This is a story that begins with the utmost horror and ends — or really continues — with acceptance, revelation and inspiration. It’s very hard to digest. I could try to explain the horror of it in detail but I don’t think I have to. There is no one among us here that doesn’t already understand — even from the briefest mention.

In 2012, Kevin and Marina Krim’s two oldest children — they have five — were stabbed to death by their nanny in their West 75th Street apartment. Lulu was 6, Leo was 2; Marina discovered the children, dying from knife wounds, when she returned home with their middle child, Nessie, then 3, from swim lessons. As she and Nessie entered the bathroom where the children were in the bathtub, the nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, stabbed herself in the neck.

The trial took place over four months in 2018; The Times and every other outlet covered it in detail. Ortega was sentenced to life in prison. The justice in the case, Gregory Carro, called her actions “pure evil” in reading her sentence.

And that was the start of what I would call a sort-of fugue state for the family, but also the beginning of a commitment to something bigger than their lives and their story. The couple and their three living children now live in Tribeca; their non-profit, born out the tragedy, will host its annual event at Tribeca Rooftop tomorrow. Choose Creativity seeks to develop social emotional development through 10 principles.

It’s safe to say they haven’t moved on because no one can move on from this sort of thing. The only thing you can do, from what I can tell, is move forward. You move forward *with* the kids — Lulu and Leo — with the memories of them firmly intact. Which is exactly what the Krims have done.

Joining Nessie in the family are Felix, 12, and Linus, 10. Felix was born just a year after the murders. Nessie is now 17. (Lulu would have been 20 on Memorial Day. The family still celebrates both her and Leo’s birthdays.)

“We’ve done this unique thing where we have brought them into our lives,” Marina said recently. “There are kids in our family who aren’t here physically. That’s just who we are.”

Starting a non-profit was not part of the plan — it just happened organically. After the murders, the Krims were adrift. They lived for a time sequestered from the press at a hotel at Columbus Circle, then with family in California, where they are both from. They debated whether they should move back to the West Coast. They considered moving far far away — Australia maybe, or India. They worried for Nessie, they worried for themselves. But eventually they realized New York City was still their home. And in a way, Marina said at the time, Lulu and Leo were here.

Their therapists said to get back to routine. Nessie would be ok, they said, if they could be ok.

When they contemplated the move back, they calculated what was “radioactive” to them — and what was not. The Upper West Side was radioactive; but Kevin was commuting at the time to CNBC in Englewood, NJ, and the westside made sense. A real estate agent contacted Kevin’s boss and offered her services — she helped them find a rental on Vestry. It was there that they met this year’s award recipient, Tribecan Craig Thomas, a novelist and the creator of “How I Met Your Mother.”

“We couldn’t make a lot of decisions at that point,” Marina said. It helped to have guides.

In those months before the family returned to the city, they were receiving unsolicited checks — the tragedy invoked a response, Kevin said, where people wanted to do *something* — anything. But there was nothing, really, to do. One of his college roommates set up a bank account. Another pal offered to incorporate a non-profit so they could do something with the money eventually. And there it waited for them.

The mission started out as art-based — Lulu loved art — and they gave grants to arts organizations like Sing for Hope and Free Arts NYC. But after a couple years, a broader goal started to come into focus: “we developed our own voice about what we really believed,” Kevin said.

As they rebuilt their lives, they realized that a concept called “creative confidence” helped them through — the idea that everyone is inherently creative and possesses the capacity to generate ideas, solve problems and create change. Coming out of covid in 2022, when absenteeism was at an all-time high, Marina used her teaching skills — she has a masters in education from USC and taught in public schools in both Southern and Northern California before kids — to develop an afterschool curriculum based on 10 principles of creative confidence. Then she wrote a full curriculum.

And now this is the organization’s mission, to spread the curriculum to schools everywhere, but especially New York City. There’s a lesson for each of the 10 principles across each grade pre-K through sixth, each teaching kids to be authentic, resourceful, patient, curious, unconventional, expressive, intuitive, present, inventive and inspired.

They now have programs in 14 schools in Districts 4 and 5; Districts 1 and 3 are next on the list. A recent bonus: Elizabeth Sweeney, PS 234’s longtime assistant principal, just joined their board.

“It’s about a growth mindset — there’s science behind it,” Marina said. “Self-advocacy, for one, is a measurable trait that you have the belief and ability to make change in your world. And you can teach it. You can be trained.”

The fact they have been able to find rewards in this tragedy is almost unbelievable. But they have. They have decided to be as open as possible with everyone — their kids, their friends, even me, essentially a stranger. “We had to make it safe to talk about them and safe to cry,” Kevin said. And Marina adds that tragedy gives life perspective. “You keep going through it all,” she said, “that’s just life.”

Their non-profit is part of that, and part of an unfathomable indebtedness to New York that they say did not take everything, but in fact gave it all back.

“This city was just so good to us,” Kevin says now. “There was an early impulse to get away — we were tempted. But in the end the city gave us a giant hug.”